Our Evolving Spirituality - and Money A planeload of seekers who fly to see the Great Pyramid and admire its mystical wonders will spend more energy getting there than it took to build the thing. Reflections on modern spirituality meeting the "limits to growth." |
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Evolutionary spirituality has moved me for years now. I don't remember the first stirring that told me that something big for me was there. One "hit" was first hearing about collective intelligence, in an article by Craig Hamilton in What is Enlightenment? magazine. The notion of collective intelligence speaks to what I feel or have felt in meditation and in groups, a sense of a larger whole I'm a part of. And I subscribed to and listened to great swaths of audio from What is Enlightenment and IntegralNaked too, Ken Wilber's online series of interviews. I was excited by the ideas. I tuned into Barbara Marx Hubbard's notions of conscious evolution and did one of her early online waves of practice. I read Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution, which was filled with charming ideas and re-frames of the tradition I'd grown up in. But what did one do with all those great ideas? Go off to the factory and make widgets with a higher consciousness? Do something modest, like retail (Nisagardatta Maharaj had a little tobacco stand and he was one of the revered sages of the twentieth century)? Is the Great Turning simply that we do the same old stuff with a higher consciousness? What should we actually do? Become a coach, was what I figured out for myself, since I was already a self-help junkie. No matter that I was severely dislocated from the larger society in which the people I would coach were working in. I was growing and learning, and more comfortable in my skin than I'd been, but I wasn't "a success" out there in the world. What was my integral work for? Part of it was my personal story. I wasn't entirely comfortable with exposure, half out and half in. I also thought then and now that the system is going to tumble like a house of cards. It's a matter of time, of course, but it seems clear that the stresses, absurdities and dead ends in the system are going to cause a profound smack down. I'm not a depressive (well, I do have tendencies but that's not driving my observation :-)). It's deep in me to understand that the system is cruising for a collapse. To say a "bruising" would be too mild. By "system" I mean the entire human interconnected play of global resource consumption in the service of our human development. It's literally not sustainable; there aren 't sufficient resources. And our climate choices are in danger of - in mortal danger of - compromising the future for untold generations. No, this must not happen! And since it's the resource consumption, with its attendant carbon outpouring, and the escalating spoliation and dwindling of much of what's left, there's little doubt that, impossible as it may seem and be, going small and local and frugal is our future. Very small, very local. Although we intellectually appreciate the scale of our dependence on the global system, and on fossil fuels, it's hard for us to get a visceral sense of it, one as visceral as say, missing supper for one night. (Obviously I'm speaking to the part of the world that assumes it's going to get supper, and every night!) To me it looks like - and I see evidence everywhere that this is popping up - small and local is the future. Relocalization. Evolutionary spirituality is about being out there on evolution's edge, conscious of that, moving with it with intention. All of its major practitioners speak of the intensity of the transition we're in, the imminence of it, the profundity of it. But it looks as if, to deliver that message, they're living the high consumption, fly where you need to go, jet-set lifestyle that's the very opposite of small and local future. From the outside at least, workshops in evolutionary spirituality often assume that you're going to spend the GDP of an Indian village, or the daily wages of a Chinese factory to get yourself a few days of that enlightenment. Riding that frugal edge is riding our own human edge. It is real in the way that missing supper can be real. It's painful at times, not because of not having enough - I have enough - but because of the addictive power of the system we're attached to. It's hard for us, me but also all of us, to see how addicted we are to the system. We tend to take its assumptions for ourselves even as we critique it. We live in the lifestyle that's already doomed and dangerous, while speaking of the future. We live on the merry-go-round and shout truisms about it to the sweet eyes we lock in with as it goes round. Still there are truths, and on merry-go-rounds same as anywhere. If Lao Tzu were around today, he would look on the carnival. Would he tweet, I wonder? Well we don't know, but "my Lao Tzu" might very well. However, my Lao Tzu wouldn't be attached, as he tweeted. His tweet haiku would doubtless inch down the screen and be forgotten. Wendell Berry, arguably the most important American writer of our time isn't online, I hear. There's a Facebook page for him though with lots of fans, most of whom I'm sure, realize the irony. But he's still a fine writer, I can hear them saying, and indeed, he is. Perhaps LaoTzu would tweet today and be gone tomorrow, riding off on his donkey through another gate into an unknown future. But I was speaking about the system. Nowadays all the interesting questions are about the relationship to the system. For example, most mainstream media conversation are about the system and while maybe interesting - are not useful. But I love the places (like MediaLens.org) which explore the border between what the media - the system - says and what more impartial witnesses know to be true. As peak oil and climate change realities truly kick in, as they must, the evolutionary edge itself will necessarily get more local, and small. Perhaps it will meet Mr. and Mrs. America in their suburban yard, trying to figure out how to grow a squash up against the south wall when they've never really known what kind of soil is there. We will all look an African in the eye sometime in the future and wish we had known sooner. Our sadness over the ocean will be very real. And for all this nothing will really be different in the secret heart of things. The love of father for daughter, and mother for son, and man for woman will be as strong. The stars will trace out the truth of Big Time and our place in it as clearly then as they will tonight. This evolutionary edge is real. We do understand what's come before with a breadth and depth that is new and worthy of celebration. We know we're on the cusp of a momentous change and that what we think and do, moment by moment, counts as never before. But the evolutionary perspective can take even deeper root, informing people as they work together to create resilient, sustainable economies we're going to need. And as soon as possible. Back to the Articles |
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